


Les prénoms de l'ancillaire

by sigaloenta



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Missing Scene, Radchaai sociolinguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 16:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6618103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigaloenta/pseuds/sigaloenta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the journey from Nilt to Radch space, Breq and Seivarden have to talk to each other about how they are going to talk to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Les prénoms de l'ancillaire

**Author's Note:**

> Very great thanks to grimark and kaberett for amazing and patient beta-ing!

>   
>  _Jen Shinnan and her cousin both spoke Radchaai, so there was no need to translate, nor any anxiety over gender or status or anything else that would have been essential in Tanmind or Orsian._  
>  — ** _Ancillary Justice_**  
> 

 

“Breq?” Seivarden looked at the assorted counters in her hand, but instead of playing the last third of her move, she curled her fingers around them. Set her fists on her cross-legged knees and squared her shoulders into the military straightness that had once been a habit. “Breq. I’ve been thinking.”

I didn’t change my expression from the polite but non-revealing one that I generally wore. I also did not point out that it would have been surprising if Seivarden hadn’t been thinking, of late. There was little else to do. A Radchaai military ship, capable of calculating the most efficient route through the unstable non-existence of Gatespace and, more importantly, of generating and maintaining its own Gate, could have made the passage from Nilt to Kalijmo in a little more than two weeks. The civilian ship on which we had bought passage (on which I had bought passage for myself and for Seivarden) would take almost three months. Passengers were allotted their requisite hours in the gym, of course, and the ship’s library was well-stocked with entertainments and games, but there would be long stretches of time with nothing to do. I would fill them as I had filled many other such journeys: watching the entertainments, singing to myself, praying before the icon of She-Who-Sprang-From-the-Lily, and considering, discarding, and adjusting potential plans. Seivarden's duties as my servant took up very little of her time. Thus far, she had spent the remainder of her waking hours sitting on her cot, arms crossed, staring at nothing or staring at me.

It was more for her sake than for mine that after two days I had suggested a game of counters. I had no particular preference for this pastime over the others available, but it gave Seivarden something to occupy her and did not require much of my attention. The version of the game we were playing, one popular among well-bred Radchaai of a thousand years past, was more intricate than those of recent centuries, but in fact it depended more on chance and less on the player's skill than modern ones did.

Seivarden took a breath and then started again. "I don't know when it started," she said. "It was after… I think it was after the Bridge."

"Yes," I agreed, without changing my expression or my inflection. "You do show more signs of thinking now than you used to."

Than when I had found her in the snow on Nilt with her internal system saturated by kef, she would think I meant. I expected her to scowl, but instead she flinched slightly. "That isn't what I meant. It's..." She trailed off again. For some reason, this was a difficult conversation for Seivarden to initiate. I considered the possible things she might be trying to say.

Seivarden looked down. Very deliberately, she uncurled her left hand and set the counters down. "After— after the bridge, and all of that,” — She gestured to indicate vaguely the fact that I had jumped off a bridge after her into a kilometers-deep gorge, along with my consequent injuries, her call for help, the weeks in the medical center, my consenting to take her along as a servant — "I didn't even think about it. It just seemed obvious to say _tu_ , after going through all of that with someone."

I said nothing. The Radchaai language had not originally had two different forms for addressing another person. But at some point long before Anaander Mianaai had taken control of the Radch and started to expand outward from it and herself, adult citizens had begun to be entitled to a polite form, a sort of linguistic social buffer against other status differences. In private, of course, such a thing wasn't necessary, and family members and members of the same household, patrons and clients, close friends and lovers generally used the simpler, older form — the one that Seivarden had begun to use with me — although I had seen customs fluctuate back and forth over time, and they were different in different places. The decision to switch from _vous_ to _tu_ could be a momentous one, and I had watched countless young and not-so-young officers agonize over whether and when to risk the question. Seivarden, of course, had never needed to agonize; at least, not as far as I had ever noticed. Whenever she had started to use _tu_ with a friend or lover, they had been flattered by the intimacy and reciprocated in kind.

"But you don't say _tu_ back," Seivarden continued in a rush, obviously embarrassed. "You only ever say _vous_ to me. But then you haven't said anything about it either, so I realized I didn't know whether you were offended.." Another pause. "I have offended you," she said finally. _Vous_ , not _tu_.

"I'm not offended," I said. I wasn't, or at least, I wasn’t offended in the way that Seivarden probably imagined. Namely, that if I was indeed a provincial nobody who had worked her way to Special Missions and who resented Seivarden's aristocratic breeding and ease, she had perhaps offended me with her presumption that we had a personal relationship beyond that required by my duties or, if not by the duties of my mission, then by whatever had induced me to take her with me. That was a factually false assumption, but not an entirely inaccurate one.

"It's simply that I'm not in the habit of using _tu_." I kept my voice very mild. "It isn't a form that a non-Radchaai has much opportunity to practice." A non-citizen. It would not have been false, if I were what I claimed to be, a wealthy tourist from very far away who had learned Radchaai for travel or business.

My words were also the literal truth. Although Radchaai was my own first language, I was not a citizen and had never been entitled to be addressed with the forms that shielded a citizen's dignity. But I had been made to serve citizens. However strongly I had loved my captains and some of my officers, I had never, in two thousand years, said _tu_ to any adult Radchaai. In those two thousand years of existence, it had not once occurred to me to wish it otherwise. In truth, even after all that had happened to me, I had not thought very much about how I was addressing Seivarden or how she was addressing me. Or about how I might have addressed others, once.

 

<|>*<|>*<|>

 

_My newest lieutenant, still damp from training and so very young, sat on a table in Esk Medical while the Medic prepared the uplink for programming. I didn’t need the very young lieutenant's data, however, to identify the mix of emotions on her face: excitement, pride, anxiety. Her heartrate would be elevated, as would her adrenaline level, but neither seriously so._

_And then she was connected, and I knew her precise pulse, I had compared it and stored it away with the hundreds of other human heartbeats that I constantly monitored, I saw the slight fluctuations in her temperature and her hormone levels, her every breath and muscle contraction and the scatter of electrical pulses in her spinal cortex. I saw all this before her own brain recognized the sudden expansion of her potential awareness, recognized me_ — _me_ Justice of Toren _. As relatively small as the expansion was, it was still more powerful than an ordinary citizen's link to Station or even to the massive, semi-disabled ships on which she had trained. The lieutenant's muscle fibers twitched. She blinked._

_"Thank you, Medic," she said, a fraction of a second after I saw her vocal cords engage. "Is this the last connection?" Her speech was slow, and her accent was practiced— this lieutenant's family was so undistinguished as not even to rate the insult "provincial"— but she spoke steadily and clearly. A good sign, in an officer. Her voice was pleasant to hear, as well. I was also standing attention next to the door as the segment of One Esk that had escorted the lieutenant from the shuttle to Medical, and I adjusted my humming to harmonize with the pitch._

  _"You're set for now, Lieutenant." The medic gestured for her to stand. "If you find that you have headaches or any other discomfort, do come to see me. It isn't at all uncommon to react adversely, when one is new to it all."_

  _The lieutenant’s pulse rose slightly and she stiffened visibly. She did not know, of course, that this particular Medic had said the same thing to every new officer who had passed through her medical bay for the last thirty years. Many of those baby lieutenants had also been embarrassed and offended by the suggestion that they might need medication to help their human brains adjust to a constant, ever-open link to Ship. That was not the whole of this lieutenant's reaction, I was sure. But although I had begun to correlate the stream of new data her implants sent me with the aptitudes data that I had already been given for her, I did not know her well enough yet to interpret her emotions perfectly._

  _"Thank you, Medic, for that kind offer, but I do not think it will be necessary." She probably imagined that there was nothing but polite sincerity in her steady voice._

_The Medic wanted to smile, but outwardly her mouth barely quirked. She had also watched thirty years of new lieutenants be offended at her solicitude. "One Esk will show you to your quarters, then, Lieutenant."_

_I stopped humming and opened my mouth. "If you will follow, Lieutenant."_

  _The lieutenant blinked again. Half-turned to look at the segment. "Of course," she said in that careful, precise voice. And then, because it was the automatic corollary ingrained in every person who had been well brought up, "Thank you for your patience, One Esk."_

 _This time, the Medic did smile. The lieutenant had addressed me with_ vous _, as if my segment were a citizen. I saw the lieutenant realize that she had misspoken before the blood began to flush to her face. Hormones were cascading in her adrenal gland and now her already-elevated pulse spiked. She was not only embarrassed but angry. Angry at herself, I thought. It was a different kind of anger from what she had felt at Medic’s words, inward-turned as well as outward. This lieutenant would be very sensitive to how others perceived her. I had no judgment on that. It was not my place, and I had known both very good officers with that trait and ones of whom I had been less fond._

_My new lieutenant's error was not unheard-of. More than one young officer, flustered and anxious to do everything with utmost propriety at the beginning her first assignment, had similarly misaddressed me when she first encountered ancillaries 'hand to hand,' as they said, even though she knew that my ancillaries were not human and would never mistake a part of a Ship for a citizen. The slip was just as common from lieutenants who had been bred to command Ships amid the histories of their ancestors’ glorious conquests as it was among those whose Houses had few or no military officers in their short and undistinguished genealogies. But it was widely assumed, I had noticed, that awkwardness around ancillaries was restricted to the lowborn and the provincial. The belief prevailed even among those who, like my Esk Medic, could have drawn a more accurate conclusion from the data of their own observations._

_Most of my young officers who made such mistakes corrected themselves immediately; others stayed silent and pretended to ignore the lapse. My newest lieutenant did neither. She pushed her embarrassment down, drew herself up and turned deliberately away from Medic toward my segment. “I beg your pardon, Ship.” Not the citizen-form, this time. “Please forgive my presumption.”_

_In two thousand years of existence, I had met officers of almost every kind, and I had not met many who were so proud, so stubborn, and so quick to recover their self-possession. I had never had a young officer apologize to_ me _for committing a like error._

  _"There is nothing to forgive, Lieutenant," I said aloud through that segment's mouth._ Nothing you do could be a presumption, _One Esk thought, but I did not say it._

_She gestured an acknowledgement. When she addressed me again, silently, she was more tentative, although I did not yet know her well enough to say whether this was caution as she tested her link or a relaxation of the proud façade Lieutenant Awn projected. "Lead on, then, One Esk."_

 

<|>*<|>*<|>

 

“Oh,” said Seivarden, in the tone she used when she was trying to play along with what she thought was my cover story. “Do they not use _tu_ in the Gerentate?”

“Some languages there have something similar,” I answered. "Some don't." My anger did not show in my voice. It was not, after all, Seivarden's fault that I did not want to be having this conversation with her at all, and her question was as good a distraction as any. “But none of them work quite the same way, in any case. In My first language, for example, a servant and her employer would never use the same forms with one another.” That was a simplification, of course, and the “forms” in that language had little in common, syntactically or semantically, with the set of Radchaai words we were discussing.

 Seivarden frowned, considering this information. To a Radchaai, it doubtless seemed odd, even improper, for two adults — two _citizens_ — to deliberately and continuously use different forms with each other. That was, after all, why we were having this conversation. “Is that why you don’t say _tu_ to me, because I’m your servant?” Just the slightest of hesitations before that last word.

“No. As I said, it’s simply not a mode that I’m used to.” 

Seivarden picked up the counters again and rolled them between her fingers, then set them down quickly when she realized what she was doing. Ungloved, her gesture verged on the obscene, for a Radchaai. Finally, she finished her move. "So," she said with a sudden casualness that I knew was studied, "would you prefer me to stop saying _tu_?"

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. The entertainments where the heroes had adventure after adventure together and risked their lives for each other in turn, yet continued in strict propriety to say _vous_ even in bed, had been considered laughably old-fashioned even in Seivarden’s day. She and I were not so close by any means, but we did, by Radchaai standards, constitute a household within which, properly, there should be no need of citizen formality. To insist on _vous_ now would be a deliberate insult, a signal that I wanted as little to do with her as possible. “If you prefer us to use _tu_ , I don’t object.”

A lie, but Seivarden’s shoulders relaxed and she smiled a little. “I guess I would," she said. Thank you, Breq." Then, slowly, as if she were still testing the feel of the words in her mouth now that we were on even terms of address, "It’s your turn.”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this discussion](http://sigaloenta.tumblr.com/post/141592192381/les-pr%C3%A9noms-du-radch-no-the-other-pronouns) (initiated by me, it must be admitted) of the French translation of _Ancillary Justice_. This is thus a missing scene that probably only exists for _La justice de l'ancillaire_ and not for _Ancillary Justice_. A pronouns-of-address AU, if you will. I've invented a Radchaai t-v practice by extrapolating from the translation, hence the use of _tu_ and _vous_ as shorthand for however it is that the Radchaai language encodes a two-level distinction of this kind. (Note that Radchaai has other ways of showing still higher levels of formality, represented in the books by e.g. polite hedging formulae, the third person replacing second and even first person, and honorific periphrases.)


End file.
